techdude

The nerve of some people. Don't worry Ross, we've got your back. Let us know if you need any help on this. You made it through the Machinima battle, you can certaintly deal with some reuploaders.

Here are some of my favorite soundtracks: 1. Bastion - My favorite game soundtrack ever. By Darren Korb 2. Turrican - This plus anything else by Chris Huelsbeck. Light techno style mixed with other orchestral tracks. 3. Portal 2 - You are probably familiar with this one, but I like it. Also it is available for free on the official website. http://www.thinkwithportals.com/music.php 4. Transistor - Haunting, great soundtrack. 5. Endless - By Fly By No, these tracks are long, but have some distinct tunes. 6. System Shock/System Shock 2 By the way, I would love it if you would do a playthrough of Bastion if you haven't already. You might like it! If you need help getting any of these, let me know.

Thanks for not going with Patreon (because of the hacks). I was concerned about that when you mentioned Patreon. (Side note, if anyone reading this has donated to patreon in the past and provided them with your credit card info, you should report your card stolen right away. Patreon has claimed that the data is "safe", however the evidence in the security realm seems to imply that, in fact, the key that was used to secure the credit card information may have been stolen by the hackers as well.) We are glad to support you, Ross. I would encourage others to support as well. In addition, while one time donations are great, it would be better for the long term if everyone that wants to donate finds a consistent and stable monthly amount that they can contribute. The more people that contribute, the more stable Ross' income will be. It doesn't even have to be that much, but do consider that because of how paypal does stuff, donations less than $1 don't end up giving much to Ross. Thanks for all the great content through the years, Ross. EDIT: No, it's all the same as far as I know. It might be less for directly from another Paypal account, but that's it. As for mod tracker, I talked about that in moon gaming actually, but edited it out since there was so much other stuff. Just thought I'd jump in here. It is the same transaction fee regardless of the card type (see https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees). No extra cost coming from paypal balance or bank account either. Of course, there is a way for people who want to donate using paypal balance or bank account to donate with no fees at all (0% transaction fee) but it requires special instructions that Ross would have to provide (Ross, if you want to PM me, I could discuss it with you). However, this method doesn't allow monthly payments. ~ techdude

Glad to hear from you and I loved the new rgd episode. An interesting fact for any readers who are not aware, In most states in the the US it is illegal to drive as slowly as Ross mentioned in the video. At least how it is in Colorado (and many other states) if you have 5 or more cars behind you and no cars in front of you, you are legally obligated to pull over and let the other cars pass. Otherwise, you can be charged with impeding traffic. In fact, usually all it takes is one of the drivers behind to call the police with the license number and the driver will get pulled over at the next major city. For more info http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/beat-ticket-book/chapter7-6.html Anyway, that aside, I'm looking forward to any more content you put out, Ross. -- techdude

Here is my shot at the photoshopping challenge : He really looks good in that HEV suit!

Ross, One quick thing on your call for assets. For vegetation, I've used Xfrog in the past as they have a pretty extensive library of plants of all types, and tutorials on getting the lighting to work as well. The best thing? They have a selection of about 160 plants you can get for free (several of which would work well in the environment you describe). All the stuff I have done is just for proof of concept or for personal use so I was curious what the licensing was on the free plants, so I sent a quick email to xfrog. Below is their complete response: So there you have it. Just one more resource for you to consider when you are building your movie. Best wishes, -- techdude

So I'm going to throw this out there, but one of the most popular people who uses pixel art in modern stuff is Freddie Wong with Rocketjump Productions. Does anyone know who does the pixel art for his shows?

Ross, Glad to hear from you again! I'm looking forward to your movie and any of the other stuff you are putting out. RGD + Movie sounds good to me! As far as the technical questions go, my favorite mic for vocals is the Electrovoice RE20. They are pretty pricey though so you might want to try one out at some local place before you buy. It is fairly common here in the US in radio and tv stations so you could call around and see if any local stations have one you could try. It is great at ignoring background noise. For the volume balancing question, check out the presets in the effects rack tab on the left. Some presets you could try include: Clean Up and Level Voice Over Voice Leveler and Noise Gate If you want to get more specific, you can tweak the individual settings in the rack, particularly Speech Volume Leveler Hard Limiter Adaptive Noise Reduction Note that on the Speech Volume Leveler, you will probably want to check Boost Low Signals, uncheck Compressor, and possibly mess with your noise gate level. Below is a quick screenshot of some of the stuff: You also have to press apply for some of the effects because not all of them allow for a live preview. You may have already played with some of these things before, but I cannot stress enough that the settings are often very specific to each voice so you will probably have to mess with it a bit until you find the settings that work well for your voice and your speaking style. For general noise reduction, highlight a piece of "blank" space where you are not speaking that contains some of the background noise. Press SHIFT + P or go to Effects->Noise Reduction/Restoration->capture noise print. Then select the whole clip and press CTRL+SHIFT+P or go to Effects->Noise Reduction/Restoration->Noise Reduction (process) to open the dialog and let you remove the captured print from the whole track. Play with the settings a little and it will work pretty well. As a final note, if none of the above stuff works for you, check out the Dynamics Processor (Effects or Effects Rack->Amplitude and Compression->Dynamics Processor). It allows for a great deal of flexibility and can let you specify different db changes (expand and compress) for varying input db value. It is really powerful when used properly, and once you get some settings that work, you can set it as a preset you can use on all your files. Hope some of this helps anyway, ~ techdude

Just finished my binge rewatch of the FM Series. It was every bit as epic and funny as I remembered it. BTW, did you know that the original episodes which are on Machinima have over a million views each?! That aside, probably my top favorite from the whole series would have to be Ep 47-48. The writing was so random and yet addictingly logical. The reason I like it the most, though is because of Eddy. I wonder what happened to him. Maybe one of his kids/grandkids is carrying on the family business as a supplier to the rebels in City 17? That would be awesome. It was around that time also I feel like the writing really started to pick up, something that carried to the very end. Jokes aside, I wanted to comment on your quote: I don't know if others feel this way, but that was one of the big things I liked about Freeman's Mind when I first started watching it. He took many of the same wrong routes I did when playing the game and had many of the same questions. Similar to Freeman, when I got to the Lambda complex, I was thinking, "I just want to go home". Here I was at the place everyone had pointed me towards, and inside it turned out no more safe than any other place I had been. Thanks for keeping the future knowledge out of the series. It really helps immerse the audience into the experience, and the small bit of outside world and backstory for Freeman you introduced (petty thief, general office dominator, Eddie). While some of the other people that do mind series like to break the fourth wall, your sticking to your guns and fighting it out like it was a real life scenario made it so much more fun to watch. I mean, in real life, who would take leaps over pits of toxic waste when the catwalk was collapsing without first looking for alternatives? Even when reality itself betrayed him, the One Free Man kept his cool while losing his mind. I have loved every moment of this series. -- techdude

Ross, first off, thanks. FM has been a highlight for years and I thank you for the time and effort you have put into it. I started watching right around the time when the whole Machinima thing was going down. In fact, it was the only reason I was even on Machinima. At any rate, later I was told that the series had been cancelled and I was greatly disappointed. Imagine my joy when one day YouTube has listed under suggested videos a NEW FREEMAN'S MIND VIDEO. Thank you for putting in the effort to bring it back. I hope it has paid off for you in any of the many ways you wanted it to. If nothing else, I feel it helped you build a community and realize how many of us appreciate your creative and production talent. Finally, congrats on the 100k subscribers! The YouTube awards are given out quarterly if I recall, so as long as you have signed up as a YouTube Partner, they will contact you eventually. Thanks again for all your hard work and I look forward to whatever you muse for the new year! -- techdude

[Looks up] AAaaaaaaaaaaaaagh... ;0

I too get somewhat nauseous when watching high motion items at 60fps. Also, I feel like it is more immersive mentally than 30FPS (not saying that is a bad thing, it just adds to the nausea). I don't mind if you keep it at 30fps. I think it looks great. Ironically, when I first saw the youtube announcement, the first thing that came to mind was, "I'll bet some people are now going to start pestering Ross to get everything in 60fps". I guess I was right. Full disclosure, as a child of the 90s, the content means more to me than the presentation quality. When I think back on some of the best movies of the decade, I don't think about how they were in fuzzy, standard VHS quality - the stories more than made up for it. Keep up the good work.

Ross, I'll take a shot at some of the technical questions. For the first one, I don't know about cs5, but I use premier and after effects CC (basically a subscription version of cs6) with raw video a bunch. The key for me was to set up the scratch disks in the settings (File->Project Settings->scratch disks) to point to an SSD drive (and it should be different than the drive the originals are stored on). Second, you can turn down the quality settings on the preview, and you might try a different renderer in the settings to see if that helps. The renderer should match your graphics card (OpenCL for ATI, CUDA for NVIDIA) The renderer I use is the Mercury CUDA hardware based renderer. In general, during editing you should have lower quality and only the final composition should be rendered at full quality. Something else you might try if you have lots of spare ram (>= 16GB should be good for 1080p), you could create a ram disk and point your scratch to that. I don't know what you have for graphics card, but a good graphs card with plenty of vram is going to make a huge difference. Premier uses graphics cards well. As a final thought on part 1, under memory settings you can adjust how much ram to reserve for adobe programs. For part 2, it's a big topic. To start, make sure you are using the presets in premier or media encoder for the YouTube size you are uploading. The problem is that every time YouTube scales it, it can mess it up. I would mess around with generating a color profile in speed grade that works, and then you can use it for all your YouTube videos. It may be possible that someone has already created a good LUT for YouTube. It really is specific to what the video contains so it is going to take some work. Hope some of this helps. I love your work Ross, ~ Techdude

No, nothing of this has been confirmed. He could pretty well be hiding the whole time or even long gone from the Aperture. I mean, it's very vague to afirm anything. What about all those paintings and that weird sound? The same goes to the Earth thing. The Combine may be ceased from the planet but that doesn't mean they dont exist anymore. We just saw some shots of a clean Earth and that's it, And like some said here, the Xenias creature have already adapted and made into the ecosystem. You were afirming things that were not confirmed, based on some very vague matters and because of that they are just assumptions. Look at these, we can just theorize http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Doug_Rattmann http://half-life.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Half-Life_universe There was no power, IIRC, when Doug went into the relaxation vault. I say you he ded. I don't recall any weird sound? That, and the only Rattman scribbilings and dens I remember are from the start of Portal 2. When did I say the combine didn't exist anymore? They certainly aren't on Earth. I figured I could shed some light on this issue. At the end of the lab rat comic, Rattman was shot by turrets and was injured. The only confirmed hit that I am aware of is a hit to his upper leg. This might not be fatal if he were put into cryogenic suspension immediately. We know he successfully patched Chell's cryo unit into the reserve grid and then he climbs into a cryo pod himself and goes to "sleep". There is no reason to believe that any of the other units, including the one he was in, had power. HOWEVER, the advice of the cube was "reset the fuses" so it is possible that his cryo unit did have power. The weird sounds were something (an easter egg) that you hear in the very last Rattman den. They are the crazed mutterings and ramblings of a madman. Specifically, on the Portal OST (I love it so much!) this easter egg track is labeled "ghost of Rattman". The name would seem to imply that Rattman dies, however, we cannot discount the possibility that the sounds are something else. I know in some scifi there are discussions of phycological patterns being left behind in areas where a person goes often, so it is possible that these are something else. Or perhaps it is Chell reading/hallucinating the various scrawling in her mind. At any rate, there is no hard evidence one way or the other. As a side note, while I know that Portal 2 takes place later, we don't know for sure the combine are not on earth. There are many places outside of the cities that show normal, blue skies in the half life series even during the combine occupation. After the citadel blows up that it gets really cloudy but clouds can change. City 17 is in Europe, but Aperture Science is in Michigan so it is likely that there is different levels of pollution and other problems. Loved the episode as ever, Ross Scott! I'm looking forward to your Halloween RGD episode. I know it will be great.